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© 2017 Schott Music GmbH & Co. KG, Mainz
Herausgegeben von
Michael Rebhahn und Thomas Schäfer
Vorwort
Steven Kazuo Takasugi: On Musical Content (from a Composer’s Perspective)
Alec Hall: Acoustics of the 21st Century
Marko Ciciliani: Music in the Expanded Field – On Recent Approaches to Interdisciplinary Composition
G Douglas Barrett: Toward a Critical Music After Sound
Nico Couck: When New Music Turns Old
Ashley Fure: Reflections on Risk. Pigeonholes, Precarity, and the Zero-Sum Game of Time
Jörn Peter Hiekel: «… es gibt keine Philosophie der neuen Musik» Zur Relation zwischen Gegenwartsmusik und Philosophie heute
Dieter Mersch: Kompositorisches Denken und Neue Technologien
Bernhard Waldenfels: Mehr oder weniger als Musik
Christian Grüny: Countering Constriction: Modest Proposal for a Discursive Reversal
Harry Lehmann: Was ist politische Musik?
AutorInnen
Musik repräsentiert, wie Kunst überhaupt, eine eigene Weise des Denkens und der Erkenntnis, die der Philosophie in nichts nachsteht, sich zugleich aber anderer Mittel bedient und anderen «Logiken» folgt. Versuche der Bestimmung eines begrifflichen Instrumentariums, das diesem spezifischen Zugriff Rechnung trägt, prägten die Darmstädter Ferienkurse des Jahres 2016; im Rahmen der Lectures ebenso wie im Kontext der dreitägigen Konferenz «EXCESS. Forum for Philosophy and Art», die sich explizit der gegenwärtigen Relation von Musik und Philosophie widmete. Die in diesem Band versammelten Essays dokumentieren unterschiedliche Auseinandersetzungen mit jener prinzipiellen Frage nach den Konstituenten und Potenzialen eines musikalischen Denkens.
Steven Kazuo Takasugi beleuchtet den Aspekt des Gehalts von Musik aus der Warte des Schaffenden und stellt die Frage nach Zeichenhaftigkeit und Metaphorik des musikalischen Kunstwerks. Aus «ontologischer» Perspektive erörtern Alec Hall und G Douglas Barrett die Brüche und Unzulänglichkeiten, mit denen der vermeintlich definierte Begriff von Musik gegenwärtig versehen wird. Welchen Entwürfen kann eine musikalische Sinnstiftung folgen, die im Zuge des Verlusts definitorischer Schärfe zur Konstitution neuer Bedeutungen aufgerufen ist? Marko Ciciliani diskutiert den ursprünglich kunsthistorischen Begriff des «Erweiterten Feldes» im Sinne eines veränderten Umgangs mit künstlerischem Material und Referentialität. Nico Couck wiederum wendet die Frage nach dem «Altern der Neuen Musik», die Theodor W. Adorno bereits 1954 aufwarf, ins Pragmatische: Mit Blick auf die Tradition interpretatorischer Details registriert er den schleichenden Verlust eines aufführungspraktischen Wissens.
In den Essays von Jörn Peter Hiekel, Dieter Mersch, Bernhard Waldenfels, Christian Grüny und Harry Lehmann, die im Kontext von «EXCESS. Forum for Philosophy and Art» entstanden, werden die thematischen Stränge der Konferenz reflektiert. Den synoptischen Texten von Hiekel und Mersch folgen Reflexionen jener Fragestellungen, die im Rahmen von «EXCESS» diskutiert wurden. Bernhard Waldenfels und Christian Grüny fassen das Musikalische aus phänomenologischer Perspektive, während es Harry Lehmann in seiner Funktion als Instrument des Politischen beschreibt.
Der programmatische Text von Ashley Fure dokumentiert schließlich einen weiteren Aspekt, der bei den Darmstädter Ferienkursen 2016 Aufmerksamkeit beanspruchte: Das Netzwerk GRID (Gender Relations in Darmstadt, heute GRiNM = Gender Relations in New Music), das die Kurse in verschiedenen Formaten durchzog, widmete sich nachdrücklich einem Themenfeld, das sich im kulturellen Diskurs – zumal in dem der Neuen Musik – lange Zeit marginalisiert fand.
Die Herausgeber danken allen Autorinnen und Autoren für die Überlassung ihrer Texte zu diesem Band. Weiterhin gilt unser Dank Schott Music für die zuverlässige und angenehme Zusammenarbeit. Auch danken wir dem Institut für Theorie der Zürcher Hochschule der Künste für die Unterstützung von «EXCESS. Forum for Philosophy and Art».
Wie unerlässlich das Hinterfragen der Bedingungen und Wirklichkeiten der Gegenwartsmusik ist, stellen die unterschiedlichen Positionen der vorliegenden Essays unter Beweis. In diesem Sinne folgen die Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik seit nunmehr sechzig Jahren ihrer Verpflichtung: Anreger eines produktiven und konstruktiven musikalischen Diskurses zu sein.
Michael Rebhahn und Thomas Schäfer
Darmstadt, im September 2017
Will a composer contemplate the content of his or her work, while the pages stare back from the desk with gaze so resentful, so scornful – yet familiarly so – when the attempt is no less than to force-stuff an entire life into the music, like gavage in the hopeful production of a rare delicacy for some listener’s consumption: musical foie gras, or of something far less palatable, illusive, pungent with a strange aftertaste, or out-and-out nauseating, repulsive, pointless? And since the composer’s path is paved with every possible obstacle: technical, aesthetical, spiritual, ethical, psychological, logistical, even the mere question of stamina – the mundane idea of awakening, day after day, to take up once again the exhaustive wrestling with ideas or materials or commitment – is it then presumptuous at best to talk so readily about the content or substance (Gehalt) of composition from the point of view of the composer? Musical semioticians, after all, have made illustrious careers with their theories of interpretation and musical meaning from the point of view of the listener, today’s inheritor of the creative enterprise. Why ask a composer about the content of his or her work when every listener has the right to this? One wouldn’t receive a straight answer anyway. And if one did, it would come with the fetor of so much sweat and personal filth, the pains and pleasures therewith, hardly the subject of respectable discourse.
Content? Any like-minded composer knows he or she needs it all and to what degree! Extremis malis extremis remedia! Desperate times call for desperate measures! But this truism is most always concealed by the idea of the single work: even the weighty masterpiece misleads us. For once something is momentarily achieved – again from the composer’s perspective – a great devaluation takes place: the difference between hunted and hauled.
In contrast, were we to listen to and study the nine hours of the complete Beethoven string quartets as a single work, having taken a lifetime to complete, perhaps we might then come closer to understand musical content from a slightly different angle: one more allied with the composer’s perspective. We could continue in this fashion: the same composer’s two volumes of piano sonatas as Books I and II of a single work. Or the entire Clavierübung of Bach. This is more conventional, more inclined toward credibility, in the case of literary authors: Dante, Proust, Musil come to mind.
An entire life crammed into a single work.
Good ideas cease to be so if they do not age well, if they are not travel-worthy, if they prove more capable as ideas spent than as ideas in their possible movement when subjected to decades of sojourn, if they exhaust their fire in one all-encompassing display only later to be repeated mechanically or jettisoned along the way. Once subjected to a sea of time, the idea must flee through an endless series of futile attempts to be born again, each time re-awakened and re-inspired, the record of which resembling the concentric rings of trees, each trial and failure embracing all previous trials and failures … as an entirety: as a life. Content may have much to do with this struggle to overcome the eternal return of the same, the seasons’ circuitry. And the composer knows these failures better than any outsider, any observer, no matter how astute: the composer lives inside these. This is content from that inner residence. This is content when the form of the complete works, arduously sought for, reflects the life well enough that its mystery is retained despite repeated penetrating analysis. It is unfortunate for some that art is not mere craft, as then mastery might be the primary aim of one’s endless activities. One would simply become more skilled, better and better, like the immortal lobster that only becomes larger and larger, succumbing to an end not by anything inherent in its biological processes. But an artistic life is much more than the mere additive process of ever increasing artistry and expertise. There is also this fundamental vertical dimension, manifest as cracks and fissures, which allows for … rather demands … substantial self-evaluation. Some may call this a failing of sorts, others may call it a crisis. How this is related to content is a very difficult yet intriguing question, one worth seriously investigating along the path of general inquiry and awareness into one’s creative process.
So what does it mean to put a life into the music? Is it only a metaphor? Is it the justification of a workaholic, sacrificing the majority of his or her waking hours to the knitting away at notes, rhythms, dynamics, timbres? And then adding the important dreaming hours as well? Is composition like a loyal comrade, a fellow companion who escorts one through the most brutish and hellish in life? Or a nit-picking accountant, bespectacled, bothersome, intruding, and always taking notes? Or a parasite that attaches itself with mandibles or tentacles, grabbing on and never releasing, or far more heinous, growing and developing from within? Is it translating one’s personal life into a secret, encoded message? Is it an encrypted diary? Is it a spiral scroll that one carries on one’s back like the mottled, dotted cones of certain sea snails, resembling some ever broadening text? And does this narrative really change over time, or simply come into focus?
One could ask the question from another angle: why does it take so long to get it right? Why would the content of individual works be depleted, evaporate, poof! – disappear, if it isn’t exactly right? And this plays itself out not only in the concept and form of the work, but in its local specifics: in the way it is interpreted, performed, and brought to realization. The devil is in the details. And so this wayward expedition, despite its lofty ambitions, feels more like driving under the influence, swerving left and right, experimenting, conjecturing, groping, advancing, retreating, endlessly redefining: the symptomatic staggering of “desperate times, desperate measures”, a realm uninhabited by the “weekend composer”, membership not by privilege or snooty exclusivity, but only by a certain criterion of artistic demand or weight. And so much of this takes place in rehearsals, in practicing, in revising, in finally getting it right. Without multiple performances of a work, one has no chance. The overly polished performance is a problem of privilege requiring other remedies. And the mere reading of scores in a context when one cannot possibly imagine the sonic results or the consequences of staging is a terrible compromise. Even the composer of fixed media works, eternally subject to the misapprehension that performance is the mere push of a button, knows all too well how the content and substance of a piece can simply disappear if the ideal playback conditions are not met within certain limits that are only occasionally obtained in concert.
But all this is not without humor. Even critical music mustn’t always take itself too seriously, or it wouldn’t be adequately self-reflexive. There is much room for humor in the pursuit of a music’s content, even when the intent itself is to show the machinations and factitiousness of music’s own contrivance. One only need to be reminded of a work such as the Diabelli Variations to see how the content of a transcendent music benefits from excursions at times into sheer, unadulterated wit: crusty, impertinent, cheeky; a thumbing-of-the-nose at the illustrious, albeit appropriated inheritance of tradition; a sober remedy for when the clouds of the incense play tricks on the eyes, when the conjuring of mystical shapes and presences seems to justify an acknowledgement of greatness. What better preparation for the final variations could there be, than to approach his signature anabasis with an impertinent stroll through the hallowed halls lined with marble busts, each predecessor in turn until his very own pedestal (his own Arietta supplanting the Diabelli theme in the end)? It is a rare instance of self-reflexivity in the early 19th century.
And what distance there is from this posturing, this temperament, to the near child-like innocence of the closing passages of op. 111, his boyhood double-trills, as if awestruck before a starry night, preceded by the most extraordinary descending sequence in the literature, a seemingly endless precipitation, each downward step imbued with an ever-deepening hue of lingering wistfulness until the perfect light is discovered again.
“Would that one’s childhood were here now, it is as if buried. Perhaps one must be old, to be able to have contact with all that.”2
Who can blame us for exiting … escaping … through such illuminated portals in which the soul takes flight, searching for that place where music would stop and linger for a moment in its inexorable path forward. Karl Kraus puts it more maliciously, “Vienna has beautiful surroundings, to which Beethoven often escaped”. One simply asks of the traveler today the burden of carrying this load forward into the future of music … the contents of which are not lightweight.
Which reminds me – what better way to show the contents of a work than by means of a stroll through its table of contents. So a program note these days lays before the reader the entirety of a Table of Contents such as that for my work Sideshow, in hopes of demonstrating how the conceptual content of the five-movement work relates to its musical material content, the nature of which requires some explication.
So the conceptual formulation, often through metaphors, is readily able to represent or construct the existential circumstance, predicament, or crisis at hand: one deeply entangled with all of life’s absurdity, meaninglessness, nihility, doom: it whispers from its lips, “all is lost”, or other such utterances, with eyes in their last extremities, though in the case of Sideshow, through the catastrophic image of a failing American entertainment business in its seminal days. Strangely, it is the musical material content – much like the human body often independent of the mind’s fatalism, with its own will, DNA, its own reflexes, its own programming for survival, audacious, determined, and seemingly fanatical, in each and every cell, as if it had a mind of its own and rebelliously follows its own course – that understands this life is not a given, but something that must be struggled for through constant self-redefinition, constant self-transformation, to the very end.
This is the dialectical relationship between the conceptual and musical material content: on the one hand, destructive and self-destructive, and on the other, existential and survivalist – impulses, drives, and processes intertwined with one another, the fate and outcome of which is unknown, often in combative extremes, often paradoxically complicit one with the other. The colors, exclamations, and energies of depression and euphoria, melancholy and heroism, despair and hope, all are inescapably linked to both their scientific and poetic formulations: precision and soul, as one might call it. And what is the soul? Is it something that one only knows if one has lost it unwittingly over time: that which one attempts to recover only after it is too late? Musil states it well: “It is easily defined negatively. It is simply that, which creeps away and hides when one hears any mention of algebraic series.”3 This latter, seen from a slightly different view – with a little playful thinking, that is, from the angle of musical material content – might include any mention of the pragmatic or any attempts at reasonable pursuits. To make impossible is therefore only an indication of the soul’s attempt to announce … to declare itself. Phenomenology … that is, sound, is the means by which material content attempts to erase it … the soul. Nature has its own terrible and exquisite patina, a decoy, its own sleight of hand, which momentarily distracts us … lures us … towards the beauty as it conducts its concealed processes of decay and forgetting.
That decay and forgetting occurs perceptually. Ambiguity as the aim of content, paradoxically, requires a much greater degree of precision than say certainty when this becomes translated into musical experience. For a composer to have vague perceptions about something is not the same as creating the experience, in the listener, of having vague perceptions. One can easily see that the latter would require a technical mastery of the highest caliber: one that is near algebraic, scientific in its precision.
As an aside, it is often said of antiquated notions that we no longer live in the days of the horse and buggy. But observe today’s automobile manufacturers ruthlessly competing to invent the better “smart car” that prevents accidents caused by human error, oversight, or inattentiveness via sensors integrated into sophisticated collision avoidance systems with autonomous braking and steering components. This was indeed the advantage of the good old horse as an independent consciousness. A horse wouldn’t hurdle itself off a cliff. It is the stupid, mechanical car that would blindly follow the controls of an inattentive driver. Perhaps more composers, dismissive of material as an exhausted enterprise, might again become invested after their long hiatus: material is not only there blindly to fill in the form or fill out the concept of the work, as if its only function is to follow the conceptual mind of the designer. Material content, as musical content, and conceptual content are again decoupled in order to revitalize and problematize a relationship that has become coordinated, correspondent, blindly obedient, and predictable. In this way, the musical material content nearly always, in some way and at some time, even defies the will of the conceptual content of the piece. (Some might see this as the resistance of history.) This contributes to the common sensation for the composer that the piece is writing itself. It seems to have its own purpose and goals. Ask any equestrian, if this isn’t also often the case with riding.
In short, the horse must simply be viewed from a different angle, not as horse power, for then the notion of material progress quickly leads to the idea of exhaustion: the tired, stubborn, recalcitrant mule. Rather, the revitalized relationship between or among independent minds invites unexpected, unforeseeable emergent phenomena. The composer harvests these … steals them actually … and claims authorship over them.
Moreover, as I see it, general inquiry and investigation into material is hardly exhausted, especially with ever-developing techniques in electroacoustic and computer-assisted manipulation. Some of the early conceptual problems have been well identified, repeated ad nauseam, and readily accepted, so as to dismiss conveniently all the work required in mining new possibilities and solutions. But in actuality, composers have only begun to investigate the potential of new materials in their practice. With devoted exercise come new unforeseen problems and classifications yet to be discovered. Moreover, there is a difference between identifying conceptual problems (discovering natural laws) and exhausting possibilities (studying their consequences). Take the zoologist or the botanist as an analogy. Taxonomical classification systems for life forms on earth have more or less been formulated, but scientists admit that only ten percent of the earth’s species have been identified to date. What is another worm? Another fly? Those fatigued by the endless annual additions, unless by an exceedingly exotic and newsworthy specimen such as something mammalian with three eyes, should never become zoologists. The behavior of that seemingly blasé fly might actually be so odd, so inconceivably abnormal, we can trust that the zoologist will study this intensively and report these findings to us. The parasitoid fly Phoridae pseudacteon is a perfect example, the egg of which once injected, develops subsequently as a larva inside the abdomen of an ant, then makes its way to its victim’s head, ultimately decapitating it, though only after much unprecedented strange behavior on the ant’s part. The illusion of exhaustion appears when the clichés of New Music seem to recycle endlessly in fixed contexts. There are at least two hidden reasons for this: 1) we have much more access to a global, international “training ground” for young composers experimenting with modeled composition, and 2) we have not yet fully developed a new pedagogy, i. e., ear-training for new materials, and thus the contexts for these vocabularies remain superficial, keep recycling … and if truly distinct, then often go neglected. Humans are capable of hearing and perceiving the most extraordinary distinctions in sonic phenomena and their behavior, and yet we opt for the fast-food versions and their fast-food contexts.
Again: we need it all. With the rejection of one or the other, the objective or the subjective, justifiable in whatever historical context in which one happens to find oneself creating, comes the danger that one faces with the aim of rebelliousness for its own sake. And yet, without this rebelliousness, we are dangerously obedient. This contradiction frames the dialectical existential circumstance or ground on which our music scuttles about.
In my own work, the emotional realm is often represented by animal voices as surrogates for the human voice. This circumvents the normal route through human expressivity, through “bel canto”, or through more idiomatic instrumental techniques, especially those that have become readily received as aestheticized human emotional gestures. If the human voice is to evoke human emotions, then for me, it would best appear as involuntary vocalizations: artifacts as a consequence of some extreme physical action or response. In other cases, any direct gesture is mitigated by a stippled deconstruction of language or utterance. This, achieved by computer-assisted, sampled audio manipulation, is a virtual medium; inherent in it, despite the increased resolution, with its enriched consequences for material, are fundamental conceptual issues regarding live performance that one must grapple with or overcome. It is often the case that when conceptual problems are solved (for example: real-time, live electronics), the neglect for material becomes even more apparent. And vice versa.
The desperation I speak of produces many types of energy: one of them is euphoria, another is a slow, conscious degeneration of faculties. Each leaves behind something of a sounding odor of sorts, as the material and conceptual content furiously search for “a means out”. Through inquiry. Through questioning. Even questioning the question is a valid query, though one should not forget that it is only one valid query among many. Content is less fact, more conjecture. Consequently, it is less object, more subject. In struggling to be, it is always still pondering its ability or even right to exist, despite its perfection, despite its flaws: imperfections that seem remarkable, exceptional, singular. If it is inclined toward the musky, pungent, or even acrid at times, it does so with intention. Thus, the freshest air, too, can become oddly suspect, like the cool, alpine breath that Castorp evaluates on his arrival at the peaks of Davos: “It was fresh – and nothing more. It lacked fragrance, content, moisture, it went in easily and spoke nothing to the soul.”4
1 An earlier essay version of this lecture was first published in Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf / Frank Cox / Wolfram Schurig (eds.), Substance and Content in Music Today, Hofheim 2014, pp. 11–20.
This is an updated, revised version in lecture form.
2 Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, ed. Manfred Engel, Stuttgart 1997, p. 18, transl. by the author.
3 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. Erstes und Zweites Buch, ed. Adolf Frisé, Hamburg 1987, p. 103, transl. by the author.
4 Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg, Berlin 1924, p. 18, transl. by the author.
Let’s start with a little joke about these ubiquitous bags that everyone has been toting about town. Exclaiming “Attack the Future” in a workable modernist font, the bag can be read twice. First, through the classical interpretation of the historical Avant-Garde and the idea of being ahead of one’s time; to risk a perilous journey into the far reaches of the unknown, returning triumphantly and holding in one’s hand an alien object imbued with mystical and transformative properties. How perfect then, that all of these courageous acts are happening in a place that actually invented such an artifact in real life! Darmstadtium, at 110 on the periodic table, is a highly radioactive substance, which, in its most stable form (Ds-281) has a half-life of approximately 10 seconds.
Sphere